The start of every year, when we welcome our new colleagues into our teams, is the opportune moment to reflect on our thinking on the very reason we come to school; learning! Over the last two months, our faculty has been involved in professional development to reflect on the latest thinking and research on how to make great learning happen.

In our last newsletter, we spoke about our faculty’s dedication to ‘Inspire, and be an inspired learner’. We also spoke about the outcomes we desire for your children here in Puchong: academic learning, personal learning and international learning. In this newsletter we would like to explore that a bit further.

Learning is at the heart of all what we do here at Taylor’s Puchong. But when we talk about learning, it could well be possible that different individuals will connect a different meaning to that concept of learning. To ensure we all have a good picture of what it actually is that we are talking about, it is important to have a definition of learning that we all can subscribe to. We have recently revised our definition which now read as follows. Learning is an ongoing process that happens in the brain in which we acquire knowledge, develop skills and deepen our understanding of processes and concepts, academically, personally and internationally.

As all learning takes place in the brain, we follow this up with a further explanation about what happens in the brain when we learn. This is what it states. Learning happens in the brain when neurons make new connections or when existing connections are being strengthened. We receive external information through our senses and upload it into our brain. We also retrieve prior data from our memory, organised in schemata. We merge various combinations and ultimately store new connections in the brain. For learning to occur we then must retain this information in our long-term memory.